Gig 068- 069 John Otway / Reading Festival
John Otway
Aylesbury Market Square
13 August 1978
Gig 069
Reading Festival
25 August 1978
‘Get ready for the festival, for the festival is only once a year.’
Josephine, by John Otway
Oh ok, if we must. I’d spent August bank holiday weekend at Reading Festival the previous two years and been variously blind drunk, soaked, muddy, threatened with violence, cold, sick, bored, and almost brained by flying cans full of dubious liquid content. Half the acts I didn’t much care for, and back then there was nothing else to do except maybe buy a hot dog or some cider. There had been some good moments – I’m thinking Eddie & the Hot Rods, I-Roy, Van der Graaf Generator, Thin Lizzy and a few others – but there was a fair amount of tedious noodling, phallocentric guitar pleasuring, boorish misogyny and general dullness. The Carnival Against the Nazis in May had been a magical transgressive moment but in general by the late 70s the counterculture had become very conservative, all capillary-action-damp denim loons and rank afghan coats, intolerant of anything which might challenge the status quo (pun intended); reggae, nah not having it; punk, fuck off or I’ll deck ya. The vibe had often been toxic, sometimes racist and borderline psychopathic in the literal sense, stoners generally not giving much of a flying bollock about anyone other than themselves. (I suppose you couldn’t blame them, it was really the only festival in those days and once the weekend was over they’d be back clocking on in a factory or office; only 14% of school leavers went to university at the time.)
But first Otway, and for once the festival vibe was joyous. It was a sunny Sunday and I went to Aylesbury with my pals Mark and David in the comparative luxury of my olive-green mini, which was involved in a mild prang along the way but let’s not dwell on that. Less than a year previously Otway was not much more than a small-town eccentric, put-upon, unemployable, lacking any conventional musical talent but happy to play the clown for anyone who would listen. Look at him now! The market square was packed to welcome the local hero with a real chart hit, tv appearances and everything. On one side of the stage was a huge photo of the lad himself, beaming and waving to the town which had bullied and mocked him all those years – he was in fact a good-looking lad, quite photogenic. He had acquired a real group and appeared to have shed Wild Willy Barrett, but apart from that he was thankfully unchanged, borderline unhinged and unafraid of physically hurting himself for his art, at the climax of the mental Cheryl’s Going Home climbing up the rickety scaffolding around the stage and getting stuck. He was obviously loving every minute of this glorious vindication, as were the audience. The often overlooked thing with Otway is that alongside the nuttiness, and almost forgotten these days, there are some great songs: the above-mentioned Josephine, the budget-busting chart flop Geneva which is strangely affecting. Forty-plus years later his continued career is founded on the loveable eccentric schtick; you do what you got to do.
So on to Reading, for the third time. Only a fool would think ‘this year it’ll be different’. I bought a ticket – but this time only for one day, not the whole weekend. Having hitherto distanced itself from punk, by 1978 there was no holding back the tide. While the Saturday line-up was fairly old-school and headlined by the Quo, Sunday featured Patti Smith, Tom Robinson and Squeeze, and Friday was pretty much full-on punk or at least new wave, and one day was good enough for me, I had a half-decent car, could go with a couple of friends, drive home and sleep in a bed. I liked this idea.
After a few nondescript sets the first act I really wanted to see was cerebral Geordie punks Penetration, taking the Stooges/Bowie blueprint to intense places, kohl-eyed Pauline Murray a magnetic presence, a less malevolent Siouxsie Sioux. They played most of debut album Moving Targets, which still stands up today, and if certain punk purists had allegedly objected to the recruitment of old-school guitar wrangler Fred Purser, I couldn’t see the problem personally and nor could most of the punk contingent in the audience. It was a balmy late-summer afternoon, the line-up was pretty good, we all sang along to the ‘Gordon is a moron’ bit when the dj played Jilted John; this year it was going to be ok. Or not. A number of skinheads had been gathering throughout the afternoon; not the style-obsessed reggae-fanatic 1969 prototypes, these were style-less, frequently shirtless cro-magnon neo-fascist goons bent on intimidation and looking for confrontation. I saw a fairly harmless hippy take a pasting for objecting to being trampled on, my pal Toby was lamped by one of them, anyone was fair game. It was genuinely scary, like Kristallnacht transplanted to a field in Berkshire. They were there for Sham 69.
If there’s one group I wish had never existed it might be Sham 69, who were essentially Monty Python’s D.P. Gumby in musical form, cloddish chanted slogans set to ur-punk chord sequences, only not that interesting – their caricature working-class anti-intellectualism put the lumpen in lumpenproletariat. If that wasn’t bad enough they unwittingly inspired a whole bunch of thickos to form terrible groups, and a larger bunch of thickos to go to gigs looking for a fight. In their defence one could argue that their oeuvre was essentially good-natured, which was more than could be said for some of their followers. Their appearance on stage was in fact something of a relief in that it gave the knuckle-draggers something to focus on instead of beating the living crap out of anyone they didn’t like the look of; instead they all – and by now there were hundreds of them – piled down the front, many of them overwhelming the security and climbing all over the stage, where the tableau started to resemble Darwin’s Ascent of Man. It sounded horrible, seemed to go on for an eternity, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse Steve fecking Hillage joined them for gormless anthem If The Kids Are United, which acquired a particular irony in that toxic atmosphere. Then finally, thankfully, they were gone.
My worry was that once they’d finished the skinheads would carry on looking for people to kick six bells out of, but in fact they fairly quickly dispersed, possibly due to the appearance of Ultravox, whose Bowie-referencing songs of alienation and gender dysphoria were kryptonite to the neanderthals: ‘he’s singing in French, run away!’ Respect to Midge Ure (I rather like Vienna), but this version of Ultravox were just better, darker, weirder, more mysterious. Rather disdained by punk purists, having been doing the rounds since about 1974 and then appearing fully-formed on a major label, they could really play and knew how to put together a cohesive set of strong tunes. Not really a festival act, but to be honest after Sham 69 anything was a relief and I enjoyed their set very much.
Next up good-time old-school rockers The Pirates, whom I wrote about in Gig 60 and who were a real festival act, all four-to-the-floor rocking tunes and cartoonish outfits. Nothing remotely innovative, hugely enjoyable, and by now not a skinhead in sight. This was starting to feel like a proper festival again. Finally The Jam, who at this moment may have been my favourite group, adolescent provincial herbert that I was. Obviously wound-up by events earlier in the day, on taking the stage Weller announced ‘I don’t care how long your hair is, how short it is, enjoy yourselves’, and kicked into a furious In The City. I’d seen them play a cracking set in Swindon a few weeks earlier but headlining a festival they seemed more than usually tetchy and didn’t really engage a large proportion of the huge crowd, many of whom weren’t there for The Jam in any case. They were of course impeccably tight and dynamic, and played a new tune which seemed to be about a tube station, but technical problems were hobbling their trademark fire and skill: Weller’s very un-festival rig of three Vox AC30s was acting up big time, and at the end of the set he smashed his rather beautiful Rickenbacker, not referencing his hero Pete Townshend referencing auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger, but because he had a massive cob on and was frustrated to (literally) breaking point.
It had been a strange sort of day, variously thrilling, terrifying, exciting and depressing. I was very happy to go home on Friday evening, and wouldn’t return to Reading Festival for fourteen years.
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